The wireless location determination system is widely applied to many systems, including location-sensitive content delivery, direction finding, asset tracking, emergency notification, and so on. To estimate the location of a target device, a location determining system must measure a quantity, which is at least a function of distance. This quantity can be the strength of signals transmitted from the access points (APs). In a free space, the signal strength will logarithmically decay with distance.
The wireless location determining system usually uses two phases for processing. One is a training phase, and the other is a location determining phase. The training phase is an offline phase, in which the system establishes the sample points (SP) and a map, known as a radio map, capturing the AP signatures at certain points of the coverage region. In the location determining phase, i.e., on-line phase, the signal strength vector from APs is compared to the radio map to find an optimal match, such as the nearest candidate, as the estimated location of the target device. There are many methods to estimate location and determine the estimation error.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2005/0131635 disclosed a method for determining the error distance of the predicted location of a target device. This method is based on a probabilistic model 101 and the collected observations of signal value 103 to determine the location of the target device, as shown in FIG. 1. The probabilistic model 101 shows the signal value probability distribution of a plurality of APs. The error estimate is determined by the expectation of the error distance between the actual location of the target device TD and the estimated location EL. The error distance estimation can be used to determine whether to add new SPs, or recalibrate the existing SPs.
The above method depends on the location decision rule. Therefore, there is a potential problem of improper decision rule or interference.